SFNM Network Journal - July/August

We have a daily ministry in the Ambassador, a residential hotel which has gone from unbelievably atrocious to rehabbed decent during that time. Owners/operators have provided space for our chaplains, mostly volunteers, to simply open the door, plug in the water heater and wait for people to come for coffee, tea, and conversation. I stopped in the lobby to get the key from the desk clerk and Jerry, his arm in a sling, was instantly alongside me. He said he had had shoulder surgery, was in lots of pain, found it worse to lie down and was just “hanging out in the lobby talking to anybody who would take his mind off that.”

“Come on up and talk to me,” I offered, getting on the elevator. “Maybe I will,” he said.

Door open – water heating – Tom came in. Tom struggles with severe depression and physical injury pain. He is a regular in worship at the Rescue Mission and we talk about The Shack, a book he just finished. Honestly, it’s a bit schmaltzy and simplified for me, but still has some useful insights and ways of presenting good theological responses to complicated, thorny questions.

Jose wandered in, sat down and nodded off, his eyes rolling up into his head. Both of us tried to engage Jose in conversation, learning only that he “is recovering from surgery”. Unspecified. I asked him what he is using and he replied: “Methadone and oxycodone.” A powerful combination and I wonder if the two prescriptions came from different doctors who might or might not be aware of the other one. Jose stood up, saying he had an appointment and staggered toward the social worker’s office, pausing briefly to ask us for prayer. Tom’s gentle compassion for Jose was moving to witness.

Jerry entered, talking nonstop. An African American gay man, he was assaulted by three men who beat him severely, breaking his shoulder. It healed badly and he needed a complete shoulder replacement. (Your shoulder is the most complicated joint in your body.) Having had a much less severe shoulder injury and resultant frozen shoulder years ago, I have some idea of what this pain is like and how it gets into your head and takes over. But what he is suffering is impossible to imagine. Suddenly, Jerry was telling us of a rapturous experience he had while trying to meditate in his room. He describes this as being swept up, taken over by, filled with gratitude, smiling as he said: “I’m a Holy Ghost kind of person.” He is so grateful for not being homeless, for having a clean, decent, safe room in which to live, for friends, for the green and blooming rooftop garden maintained by two hotel residents, and more. Again he says: “I’m a Holy Ghost kind of person,” following that with “I can’t talk about this with many people.” Just so did Jerry jerk me out of a bad place, a sense of loss, I had fallen into. Truly, “the Spirit blows where she wills.”

After Jerry left, Tom and I shared prayer for both Jose and Jerry. Tom mused: “I wonder who our next mystery guest will be.” How marvelous that Tom embraces this as our ministry. Leo came crashing in, arms and legs contorting wildly when he sat down, beginning a rambling story about his sister. Leo was brought into Network Ministries decades ago by Scott. An untutored but gifted pianist, Leo, sadly, is also a longtime meth user whose major goal is to be “buried in the reservation” in Utah. While I don’t deny Leo’s personal responsibility for his plight, he does always make me remember and pray forgiveness for the way Native Americans have been treated for centuries. I cut his discourse short, knowing that it would be endless otherwise, asking (once again) if he thought about quitting the drugs. Silence. I held my breath. Had I blundered, making this child of God feel rejected, judged, unacceptable by my repeated asking? I don’t want to sever the long relationship we have. Leo turned to Tom, saying: “Only Glenda and John O’Brien care enough to keep asking me that.” I wonder if he realizes that John is long dead or if somehow John’s raspy voice still comes to him. “The Spirit blows where she wills.” Leo gives a lesson learned over and over – love requires some sign of truly caring about a person’s life choices. God calls us to keep on being there for any and all of Her children. God calls us never to take the easy road of simply accepting that a person is “doing the best he can.” None of us, no matter our societal status, are doing the best we can.

John O’Brien was a difficult person to get along with to put it mildly. Whenever I moderated community meetings, my heart sank with John’s entry, knowing he would go off on some rant and be almost impossible to shut up. But he cared about the people of the Tenderloin and other poor people and was not afraid to challenge them (like Leo) or to challenge City Hall, though he was in constant physical pain. Just how much he was respected and by how wide a range of people became apparent when I stood up to lead his Memorial Service turning to face a standing room only congregation in a large hall, including the Mayor of San Francisco. All expressed gratitude for having had to struggle with this pugnacious and tenacious worker for justice. It was a humbling experience. Years later, Leo reminded me of John’s response to God’s call to work all your life for what is right and not be afraid to challenge an individual or an institution.. “The Spirit blows where she wills.”

Another day at the Ambassador Hotel chaplaincy – the Listening Post. Ray comes in but the water is not yet hot enough to make coffee and he goes out again. Steve comes in, his bowed head, slumped posture and inability to make eye contact all kinetic signs of his profound depression. His answers to my comments and questions are mostly monosyllabic. Ray comes back talking a blue streak about his daughter having called to ask Daddy to come and bring a gallon of milk because her mother came back from the store with just TV dinners. Ray is furious. Accuses his ex-wife of being an active addict and expresses fury that she gained custody of their 3 year old “just because I’m bi-polar.” (Say a prayer for this little girl.) But Ray pauses to greet Steve warmly and Steve opens up a little. Ray leaves to catch the bus and take the milk to his daughter. I note to the still present Steve that I had not met him before and he says he doesn’t come often because Ralph puts him down. I know Ralph. He is the building bully. In a time when the owner of the building was trying to harass everyone out so that he could sell to an upscale developer (which the community successfully fought because it would mean the loss of another 168 units of affordable housing), Ralph was the “enforcer.” Now he is the loan shark, charging $2 for every $l he loans. I must remember to tell the other Ambassador chaplains to be very firm about monitoring Ralph’s behavior in the Listening Post. It can be difficult. Steve abruptly leaves. J.L. comes in. He’s worried about his grown daughter who he suspects is in an abusive relationship. “She would never tell me that,” he says, “because she knows I would kill him. In all my life I have never put my hands on a woman in anger and I have no respect for any man who does.” Then he dramatically changes the subject, saying that “the 16th” (this Saturday) is the 2nd anniversary of my oldest brother’s death.” His brother was on daily kidney dialysis, living in a Tenderloin residential hotel, and had “been sick all his life.” One day he refused to be taken for the dialysis and that night he died. JL is kicking himself because he didn’t go and make his brother get the treatment. I say that daily dialysis is horrible and that at some point we must respect a person’s wish to be in control of his suffering including ending it. (People have said to JL that awful thing: “Man proposes but God disposes”, meaning that we should not interfere with natural processes. Surely dialysis and a lot of other things interfere with natural processes, but that is another topic.) I switch the conversation to grief and JL’s tears flow freely, along with his words about his brother, his abusive father who beat up daily on JL’s mother before he was committed to a mental hospital, more about how much his older brother meant to him…. JL remembers that I performed his brother’s memorial in the hotel and asks if I really believe the things about eternal life in God’s love. I do.

"You just never know what will happen in that afternoon chaplaincy in a Tenderloin hotel."

Another day, this one different from the previous two. We have a group from the outset and for most of the time, instead of individual comings and goings. (Exceptions: Sergio comes to borrow a couple of books and another man drops in to ask if he is too old to become a Catholic. I say I’m sure he isn’t but he should come on Monday to talk with the priest who is regularly here.) We talk about how people are feeling. Several comment that the Listening Post is crucial for them because it provides an encouraging place to be with people rather than to isolate and become more depressed and withdrawn. One says it is a lifesaver. I ask about Kar and a couple of people comment on how caring she is, tho “she has her own set of problems.” This leads into talk about helping others – “gets you outside yourself and makes you feel good.” Someone reports that she hopes to go on a church sponsored retreat to Santa Cruz in October and we talk about how the ocean just makes you feel better which leads into a discussion about the great variety of life in the ocean, the wonders of it (“I saw this fish in an aquarium and it had a face”) the endless imagination of God, and a question about the habitat of seahorses (I promised to research this and tell them next week). Steve breaks his silence, telling of seeing what he thought was a piece of watermelon floating in the ocean, how he grabbed it to eat (a rare treat, dear reader, for people living on subsistence) only to find it was a jellyfish (double ouch!). He goes on to say he is on regular Thorazine and everyone commiserates (look up the side effects of this powerful drug). We switch to what people have been reading, Steve asks if he can borrow a couple of Newsweeks, and two people who have changed from coffee to chamomile tea pronounce the tea calming and soothing, thus better for blood pressure.

Tom asks what time it is and all are surprised to learn we have been there for l l/2 hours. Time drags for most Ambassador residents but the chaplaincy is welcome respite and restoration of hopeful energy.

Grateful thanks to all of you who are now chaplains and/or have been chaplains in the past. All present chaplains and many who have moved on were mentioned by name and with gratitude in this conversation. “The Spirit blows where She wills” and it is clear that you have been her instrument in singing the song of Love.

Dear Family of Friends:

In the ever-hurrying rush and noise of time, this is one moment that confirms each and all of you, and also me, as members of the family of created things and beings on our earth. The air is still. Barely a leaf moves on the shelter trees in front of this house on this island in San Francisco Bay. The gnarled and widespread branches of these trees form an arch above the ladder-laden work-van parked at the curb. Still is the motor; at rest beneath the canopy of leaves.

These trees stay clothed in leaves all year. Each one of those oval gatherers of sunlight comes into being and contributes to the life of the tree’s root and stem, giving its all. Then it hands back the chlorophyll it requisitioned in its beginning for its life’s assignment. Released from its duty, turning yellow first, then brown, it falls to the ground. Swept up by wind or the gardener’s rake, it joins its generation on the compost heap for new, life-sustaining assignments. But today all of the leaves shine brightly green in the festive light of the rising sun. So do the leaves of all the neighboring summer trees and flowering bushes. The roses and impatient flowers in the garden are still. The palm trees by the neighbor’s house across the street hold still their fronds. The tall eucalyptus trees above the meadows of the golf course suspend their habitual swaying and hold still.

Little morning-moths and mosquitoes eagerly propel their wings. Each time one of them dances out of the shadow of the tree or branch it manifests a sunbeam. The light renders the insect translucent and real. In the shadow I can barely make out a movement. In the sunlight the amazingly delicate but energetic tiny creature manifests the fragile beauty of all of life.

The air is still. A steady hum of motor noise from Oakland’s freeways provides the ever-present basic background sound for our moment. Like the one-stringed instrument, the drone, beneath and behind the master musician’s flute and tabla melody. ... Or like that two-point-seven Kelso remnant we still have, the universal echo of that jubilant explosion, when All that now is, ever was, or will be burst into Being!

But on this day all this holds still and draws its being from the sun’s mild morning light, ... like the young hawks I hear crying from the eucalyptus trees: “Kleat, kleat,” they cry and fall back into silence. On their departing, beckoning note (somewhere between the D-string and the E), a robin at some distance enters the universal song to sing his verifying melody. Not long or loud, but just enough to say: “I also am part of this, I and my family.” Then he falls silent once again. And for a while a festive stillness reasserts itself...

Shabbot Shalom
Day of God-granted rest
how beautiful you are

How grateful I am for this moment of perception, to breathe in Spirit, gather strength, to labor on: in pain and joy to give my all; like all the yellow-brown leaves, ready to fall. You make me mindful of it all; give me the light to see, and the eyes to take it in, to move this marvel – Life – within my heart and soul and share it with my friends.

I thank you God.

God by you all.

Blessings from ol’ grandpa Fritz

Right now, it appears that the biggest barrier to health care reform is people who think that it will hurt them. According to a New York Times poll, “69 percent of respondents in the poll said they were concerned that the quality of their health care would decline if the government created a program that covers everyone.” Since most Americans currently have health insurance, they see reform as a poverty program – something that helps poor people and hurts them. If that’s what you think, then this post is for you.

You do not have health insurance. Let me repeat that. You do not have health insurance. (Unless you are over 65, in which case you do have health insurance. I’ll come back to that later).

The point of insurance is to protect you against unlikely but damaging events. You are generally happy to pay premiums in all the years that nothing goes wrong (your house doesn’t burn down), because in exchange your insurer promises to be there in the one year that things do go wrong (your house burns down). That’s why, when shopping for insurance, you are supposed to look for a company that is financially sound – so they will be there when you need them.

If, like most people, your health coverage is through your employer or your spouse’s employer, that is not what you have. At some point in the future, you will get sick and need expensive health care. What are some of the things that could happen between now and then?

Your company could drop its health plan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of the population covered by employer-based health insurance has fallen every year since 2000, from 64.2% to 59.3%. * You could lose your job. I don’t think I need to tell anyone what the unemployment rate is these days.** You could voluntarily leave your job, for example because you have to move to take care of an elderly relative. You could get divorced from the spouse you depend on for health coverage.

For all of these reasons, you can’t count on your health insurer being there when you need it. That’s not insurance; that’s employer-subsidized health care for the duration of your employment.

Once you lose your employer-based coverage, for whatever reason, you’re in the individual market, where, you may be surprised to find, you have no right to affordable health insurance. An insurer can refuse to insure you or can charge you a premium you can’t afford because of your medical history. That’s the way a free market works: an insurer would be crazy to charge you less than the expected cost of your medical care (unless they can make it up on their healthy customers, which they can’t in the individual market).

In honor of the financial crisis, let’s also point out that all of these risks are correlated: being sick increases your chances of losing your job (and, probably, getting divorced); losing your job reduces your ability to afford health insurance, either through COBRA or in the individual market; if your employer drops its health plan, that’s either because health care is getting more expensive (meaning harder for you to afford individually) or the economy is in bad shape (making it harder for you to get a job that does offer health coverage).

In addition, there is the problem that even if you are nominally covered when you do get sick, you insurer could rescind your policy, or you may find out that your insurance doesn’t cover the treatment you need. But while important, this is a second-order problem. The first-order problem is that as long as your health insurance depends on your job, your health is only insured insofar as your job is insured – and your job isn’t insured.

The basic solution is very simple. In Paul Krugman’s words: “regulation of insurers, so that they can’t cherry-pick only the healthy, and subsidies, so that all Americans can afford insurance.” I know that there are lots of details that consume people who know health care better than I do, and I know those details are important. But as an individual who is worried about his or her own health insurance, that’s what you want, You want to know that if you lose your job, you won’t be shut out because you’re too sick,*** and you won’t be shut out because you’re too poor.

But we won’t get there as long as people remain convinced that health care reform is for poor people. It’s for everyone – everyone, that is, who isn’t independently wealthy or over the age of 65. Because all of us could lose our jobs. (Have I repeated that point enough?)

Now, I admit that if you are over 65, health care reform is not for you, because you are in the one group in our society that enjoys true health insurance – insurance that you cannot lose, that is paid for by taxes, and that is effectively guaranteed by the government. So maybe there’s nothing in it for you, except perhaps an improvement to the prescription drug component of Medicare. But I cannot believe that, as the only people who have reliable health insurance, you would oppose health care reform that would provide reliable insurance for the rest of us.

* This doesn’t necessarily mean that all those people lost-employer based health coverage because their employers dropped their plans; some of it could be that employee contributions were increased to the point where they couldn’t afford it anymore. 1.1 percentage points of the shift is due to people becoming eligible for Medicare or military health plans.

** If you lose your job, or you get divorced from a spouse through whom you get health coverage, you are eligible for continued coverage under COBRA. However: (a) this only necessarily applies if your employer has 20 or more employees; (b) you have to pay the full, unsubsidized cost of your health plan, which can be particularly difficult after losing your job; and (c) it only lasts for eighteen months.

*** I said earlier that insurers can’t charge premiums that are less than the expected cost of your care unless they can make it up on the healthy customers, and they can’t in the individual market. But if all insurers are prohibited from doing medical underwriting (pricing based on healthiness), then they will all have to overcharge the healthy customers, and the system could work. This is still a tricky issue – and a single-payer (like Medicare – would be much simpler – but it can be made to work even in a competitive market.

Update: A couple of small things. And one big thing:

First, I called rescission a “second-order” problem. I meant “second-order” not to mean that it isn’t important, but that it is logically subsequent to the question of whether you have health insurance in the first place, and this post is about whether you can count on having health insurance in the first place.

Second, there is a problem with COBRA I didn’t mention: If you relocate to an area where your employer doesn’t have a plan, then you can’t count on it at all.

Third, a few people said that it was the fault of the administration (or the Democrats generally) that health care reform is framed as a “poverty program.” There’s something to that point, but I don’t think it’s quite right (and I didn’t put it right in the first paragraph above). I think it is a poverty program – but the vast majority of us are, actually poor. The combination of job loss and serious illness could wipe out almost anyone (under the age of 65 – actually, anyone over 65 as well, since Medicare doesn’t cover extended nursing home care), and we all suffer serious economic insecurity because of it. The political problem is that the median American doesn’t identify as poor (although he probably thinks he needs more money) and thinks that poverty programs are for “other people.” I think that middle-class and upper-class people should support poverty programs for other people but that’s an unnecessary discussion, My point here is that the vast majority of us are poor, when it comes to health care, and therefore we should get behind reform out of self-interest.

The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy or our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.

War is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits. But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe.

The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain ... how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?” Mahedy writes. “If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, what, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?”

In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, families are massacred in air strikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind.

Our religious institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.

We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.

Wars always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. Those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen – the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys – those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them.

“In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”

The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death.

War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.